11 New Books We Recommend This Week

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Aug. 2, 2018

The singer-songwriter Josh Ritter has a line I sometimes quote to aspiring writers anxious about balancing their artistic ambitions with their desire for an audience. “I’m singing for the love of it,” Ritter proclaims in “Snow Is Gone,” “have mercy on the man who sings to be adored.” Do your thing, in other words, and let your fans find you on your home turf. Compromising your principles still doesn’t guarantee an audience, but you’ll always have to answer to your idea of yourself.

Sermon’s over! Time to read. This week’s recommended titles offer up a handful of characters who refuse to pander to the crowd, from the prickly Princess Margaret (in Craig Brown’s unconventional biography) to the haughty fashionista Loulou de La Falaise (in Christopher Petkanas’s oral history) to the eccentric Keiko, protagonist of Sayaka Murata’s novel “Convenience Store Woman.”

Times being what they are, we also suggest a book about the impact of the opioid crisis, and a graphic novel about the pathologies of race relations, and Michiko Kakutani’s look at the erosion of objective truth as a democratic value. Rounding things out are a couple of histories — one about milk, the other about anti-Semitic violence in Eastern Europe — and a clutch of debut novels worth tossing in your beach bag.

Gregory CowlesSenior Editor, Books

CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN,by Sayaka Murata. Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori. (Grove, $20.) Keiko, the 36-year-old heroine of this small, elegant and deadpan novel from Japan, senses that society finds her strange, so she culls herself from the herd before anyone else can do it. She becomes an anonymous, long-term employee of a convenience store called Smile Mart. “She is a sort of wimple-free nun, the Smile Mart her convent,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “I have mixed feelings about ‘Convenience Store Woman,’ but there is no doubt that it is a thrifty and offbeat exploration of what we must each leave behind to participate in the world.”

NINETY-NINE GLIMPSES OF PRINCESS MARGARET,by Craig Brown. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) In this unconventional look at the life of Princess Margaret — the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth and one of the 20th century’s great malcontents — Brown swoops at his subject from unexpected angles. It’s a Cubist portrait of the lady. The book is “gloriously truant,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “Brown ignores all the starchy obligations of biography and adopts a form of his own to trap the past and ensnare the reader — even this reader, so determinedly indifferent to the royals. I ripped through the book with the avidity of Margaret attacking her morning vodka and orange juice.”

DOPESICK: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America,by Beth Macy. (Little, Brown, $28.) In her latest book, Macy, the author of “Factory Man” and “Truevine,” offers portraits of opioid users and a corporate and medical history of the epidemic from the mid-1990s to the current day. “Macy’s strengths as a reporter are on full display when she talks to people, gaining the trust of chastened users, grieving families, exhausted medical workers and even a convicted heroin dealer,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “Macy captures an Appalachian landscape in a state of emergency and in the grip of disillusionment, but there’s little here that’s new. Indeed, that’s part of her point — not enough has changed.”

THE DEATH OF TRUTH:Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump,by Michiko Kakutani. (Tim Duggan Books, $22.) The former Times book critic draws on her extensive reading to portray an America that is creeping toward authoritarianism by way of the current administration’s distortions and manipulations. President Trump, she writes, is “emblematic of dynamics that have been churning beneath the surface of daily life for years, creating the perfect ecosystem in which Veritas, the goddess of truth … could fall mortally ill.”

EARLY WORK,by Andrew Martin. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) This marvelous debut novel, about a male writer’s romantic entanglements, is partly about the age-old drama of ethics getting steamrollered by desire. But it’s more than a tale of adultery, because its heart is never far from the world of literature. “It’s like one of those restaurant dishes that take a vegetable and do it in multiple preparations on the same plate — ‘beets, three ways’ — in an effort to surround and capture that vegetable’s essence,” Molly Young writes in her review. “‘Early Work’ is books, three ways.”

MILK!A 10,000-Year Food Fracas,by Mark Kurlansky. (Bloomsbury, $29.) Kurlansky, chronicler of food and its history, from “Salt” to “Cod,” now turns to milk and how it has wended its way through many civilizations and cultures, exploring everything from breast-feeding to the qualities of camel milk. According to our reviewer, Rich Cohen, the book is a history of the world through bodily fluid but also “a kind of stealth memoir — between the lines, it’s all Kurlansky, memory, taste. … It’s the sort of book that Proust might have written had Proust become distracted by the madeleine.”

CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX,by Jordy Rosenberg. (One World, $27.) A mind-bending romp through a gender-fluid, 18th-century London, Rosenberg’s debut novel is a joyous mash-up of literary genres shot through with queer theory and awash in sex, crime and revolution. It is at once very funny and very fierce, as Garrard Conley’s review notes. “His satirical passages on academia and its unholy union with capitalism ring only too true,” Conley writes. “And in the novel’s final paragraphs, he offers one of the most trenchant calls for progressive action that I have read in a very long time.”

POGROM:Kishinev and the Tilt of History,by Steven J. Zipperstein. (Liveright, $27.95.) Before the Holocaust, Jewish suffering was synonymous with the name of the city, Kishinev, where in 1903, 49 Jews were killed in a paroxysm of violence. Zipperstein examines not just the event but also its far-reaching repercussions. Anthony Julius, reviewing the book, calls it impressive and heart-wrenching: “The episode is so little known now that its facts are likely to come as a shock to most readers,” he writes. “Zipperstein gives us a strong, clear narrative as well as appalling details.”

FRUIT OF THE DRUNKEN TREE,by Ingrid Rojas Contreras. (Doubleday, $26.95.) This beautifully rendered novel, rich in specific detail inspired by the author’s experience, explores the responsibility of those with choices to those without, against the backdrop of a terrifying subject — coming of age amid the uncontrolled violence of the Colombian civil war. “You don’t need to have grown up in Bogotá to be taken in by Contreras’s simple but memorable prose and absorbing story line,” Julianne Pachico writes in her review. “Contreras’s depiction of growing up amid such constant violence provides some of the most arresting passages in the book.”

YOUR BLACK FRIEND AND OTHER STRANGERS,by Ben Passmore. (Silver Sprocket, $20.) Passmore, a young artist who cut his teeth in the anarchist punk scene of New Orleans, draws on the daily stress of his encounters with white people in this graphic novel collecting his recent strips. In her Graphic Content column, Hillary Chute called the title episode “a small masterpiece of storytelling”: “It uses the economy of comics — and its ability to deploy art and color to undercut its own prose voice — to present the discomforting relationship between those who move through the world feeling unmarked by racial expectations and those who have to contend with them at every turn.”

LOULOU AND YVES:The Untold Story of Loulou de La Falaise and the House of Saint Laurent,by Christopher Petkanas. (St. Martin’s, $45.) This flashy, gossip-packed oral history details how de La Falaise changed fashion as muse to Yves Saint Laurent. Michael Callahan reviewed it (alongside two other books about fashion) and applauded the decision to make it an oral history: “What results is an affirmation of both the fashion industry as a pit of facile, well-accessorized vipers and the fascination that de La Falaise engendered, due not only to her role as haute gamine but to her indifference to the whole glittering shebang.”